She’d expected choosing her mother’s guardian to be more difficult, however. Allison’s Beowulf upbringing made it still harder for her to accept the notion that she needed to be protected against people she’d never even met. She could grasp it intellectually, but even after multiple attempts to assassinate her elder daughter, she found it emotionally incomprehensible that complete strangers might wish her harm. Besides, any Beowulfer was bound to have a few problems with the notion of a personal retainer prepared to die in her defense. On top of which, and also as a product of that Beowulf upbringing, she…took a little getting used to for even the most liberal minded Grayson armsman imaginable.

Honor had been painfully aware of the Herculean task she faced finding some way to deal with all of that, which was why she’d been so delighted by how quickly she’d discovered Corporal Anastasia Yanakov, the very first Grayson woman to complete the harsh, demanding armsman’s training course.

A double handful of additional women had followed her since, and more than half of them had ended up in the Harrington Steadholder’s Guard. About half the others had been snapped up by the Mayhew Guard and Palace Security, and the remainder were scattered about in the guards of some of Grayson’s more progressive steadholders.

The real dinosaurs were going to resist such a bizarre notion to the last ditch, but their loss (and stupidity) was Honor’s gain, and Anastasia (a fourth cousin of High Admiral Judah Yanakov) was the perfect example of why. Her deplorably radical father had sent her off-world to Manticore for her schooling, where she’d completed a master’s degree in criminology and law enforcement (and captained her college pistol team) before going home and fighting her way into the armsman’s program. She’d graduated third in her class, as well, and there was no question she was headed for officer’s rank. All armsman officers rose from the ranks, however. Every one of them started as a simple armsman, and while any woman intruding into that traditionally male preserve was likely to find the climb more difficult than her X-chromosome-challenged fellows, Anastasia clearly had a head for heights.

In the meantime, she was very much the product of two worlds. She was the perfect interface for someone like Allison Harrington, and while she possessed a sly sense of mischief, she was enough unlike Miranda LaFollet to avoid reminding Allison (or Honor) of another Grayson woman who’d learned to straddle both of her steadholder’s worlds.

At the moment, Matlock and Yanakov were stationed with her own trio of personal armsmen. The five of them had spread out far enough to allow Honor and her family an island of privacy, but they formed an alert, ring around the terrace’s perimeter as they watched the newcomers finish trooping out the doors.